I'm curious about this, but I can't find it by searching that translation site, and image match shows that it just popped up on imgur on October 10 with no notes or anything. Is it based on services requested from that company, real time translators, census or some other data, some random online poll results, or what?
I can't remember ever encountering someone here who spoke German but not English, so maybe it's just something where they're counting "took German in high school." It's relatively easy for English speakers to pick up, so I think it's a popular choice among slackers.
And the Chinese thing is confusing to me too. Did they lump a bunch of mutually unintelligible languages in together, or are they just counting one? Because if they're counting ALL Chineses together, I am boggled that it's not the #3 here.
EDIT: So as soon as I posted, I found
the original, but I still can't find anything about how they reached these conclusions.